Wearable technology is a new class of electronic systems that can provide data acquisition through a variety of unobtrusive sensors that may be worn by a user. The sensors gather information, for example, about the environment, the user's activity, or the user's health status. However, there are significant challenges related to the coordination, computation, communication, privacy, security, and presentation of the collected data.
Additionally, there are challenges related to power management given the current state of battery technology. Furthermore, analysis of the data is needed to make the data gathered by the sensors useful and relevant to end-users. In some cases, additional sources of information may be used to supplement the data gathered by the sensors. The many challenges that wearable technology presents require new designs in hardware and software.
The advantages of the wearable device include its proximity to the user and consistency of its computations. For example, a number of wearable devices, while worn by the user, constantly and continuously monitor user's data and/or vital signs of the user. Such information can be useful in subsequent analysis of condition and behavior of the user and/or can be used for performing an action necessitated by the measurements.
However, the constant monitoring of the user's data can reduce the flexibility of the measurements that wearable device can perform, which can lead to undesirable conclusions.